


Putting Down Roots

by Anonymous



Category: Naruto
Genre: Isekai, no betas we die like men: avoidably, updates will be slooooow
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-10-15 04:13:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17521796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Being reborn should come with a warning.





	Putting Down Roots

She's naked. Cold. The grass beneath her pricks her back as she writhes and slithers, slick with blood, screaming without making a sound. Everything _burns_ inside, teeth gnashing loudly against bird calls and the hums of summer insects. It's twitching, looking broken, that they find her, gnarled fingers tangling wild hair.

She feels a slim bite, in the back of her mind, in the back of her neck, and then... Nothing.

...

When she was younger – foolhearted and trusting, doe-eyes and all – her class had visited a stable. The mounts were giants to a clutch of seven year olds, and just as thrilling. Giddy as they were when they broke for lunch, they paid the ground no mind and sat carelessly on soft, dandelion specked grass. She learned, that day, that ant mounds can be underground and near invisible. They'd swarmed her skin en mass, a hungry black and red carpet covering all color up past her waist and to her heaving chest. That was nothing compared to this.

...

She wakes with a gasp, raspy on her swollen throat, and bundles of hives stinging and itching as they bloom across her chest, fear inciting fear. A sounder mind would bid her calm – remind her stress induced them. A sounder mind, however, is not in control, and her eyes roll when the anaphylaxis spots her vision with black. Another prick and she's gone.

...

Her mind is as thick as paste, as her tongue dried to the roof of her mouth. Her breathing comes easier but she is too adrift to notice it.

Time swims at a snails pace, and she finally notices the room she's sat in. It's dim and stinks of stale air and bad things. Old blood, she sees before her. Dust, as a mote falls on her left lashes. With effort she recognizes her face is flush with the floor, that there is drool puddled on her right cheek, that her hands have been bound in thick metal before her. A bad dream, she figures, mind listless and foggy.

A door clicks open behind her, the gentle slap of soft shoes on polished cement, the press of eyes on her back. The sounds of a voice babble behind her and her unfocused eyes drift skyward. She rolls her eyes when a foot connects with her side, head lolling towards the offender – a blur in black and metal.

A Bad Dream, she reaffirms, drifting back asleep, because she hadn't felt a thing at all.

...

She's tied upright in a chair now, thoughts cleared and flesh un-numbed. She squints, trying to force her eyes to readjust, but her focus is as shitty as ever without her glasses, and her captors remain smears.

The girl is well and fucked and she knows it. Where _here_ is, who _they_ are, though... anybody's guess.

Bad dream, her mind supplies, but she's not so sure anymore.

There's a good cop/bad cop happening here, she decides: the slim one with pale hair gentles her and the big one with a smudge of color on his head roars and startles her, jostles her, has flipped the chair back and knocked her unconscious twice. He's holding a shiny – a sharp, she bets – and makes more rumbled, gnashing sounds, pointing it towards her.

The trembling is slight - the trembling of seen prey hoping it's predator passes it by but ready for it to not - and her bottom lip is gnawed half raw.

The angry words get louder, rush in staccato and the sharp is swung towards her. Inside she knows it's futile to try and defend herself, limbs taunt against the chair, but the adrenaline drives her to try. She knows this could be the death of her – this isn't a dream and she won't be saved – but she wants to _live_ and her premature scream is cut short when her chair's arms stretch lightning fast, twining around the blade and offending hand. The large one swings the other fist and the jailing limbs bind it too with only a wooden creak. She's panting – hyperventilating – when the pale one swoops in close and meets her gaze.

They have no pupils, and she screams.

...

She wakes up in a new cell.

There's a window letting in light and pollen and small, bloodthirsty bugs. The bed beneath her has a thin mattress and sheets like a hospital's, and the shift she'd barely noticed before has been swapped for medical blues. A shrouded figure stands before her in whites and reds, flanked by dark blurs standing stock still. A withered voice in a firm tone – like he's giving orders, like she's being sentenced. Or maybe he's reciting the Hippocratic Oath – could go a few ways.

Her mind keeps flicking back to the chair.

The chair that grew wooden extensions to save her.

In the room she was being held prisoner.

This must be what being on drugs feels like.

Drugs...

Looking down she prays for drugs, because Wonderland syndrome is catching on to her tiny hands wrapped together beneath a flat chest, and what she'd thought was vertigo worsens because it's not her half-blind eyes playing tricks, it's the universe; the atoms and their quarks have grown the world and shrunk her, but what did she _drink_ , what did they _eat_ to get this way?

The words are wisps blowing past and she's on the verge of screaming again.

What do they want from me, she wonders, in the same synapse that she wonders just who it is she's supposed to be.

I'm _me_.

I'm me I'm me I'm me, but the fingers clutching each other are soft and unscarred, and the whine from her throat is too high.

_I'm me_.


End file.
